How to improve baking quality in cycles render engine?
Have you tried resizing the 1k image down to 256 in a image editor? 

You not gonna get a very sharp image with such a low image resolution, I would try to manually unwrap the the object and give areas that need more detail more UV space on the image. 
You can also try adding adding UV's on top of each other if they share a identical texture on the object, so instead of 2 separate UV's there's just 2 UV's on top of each other sharing the same image. :)